Enterprise 2.0 - the non-debate
If I'd paid the full whack $2,495 to attend the Enterprise 2.0 conference I'd be demanding at least a partial refund. It seems the 'Enterprise 2.0 - what a crock' debate was less than a damp squib and more like a feeble whimper. Here's the back story:
Therein lies the Big Lie. Enterprise 2.0 pre-supposes that you can upend hierarchies for the benefit of all. Yet none of that thinking has a credible use case you can generalize back to business types - except: knowledge based businesses such as legal, accounting, architects etc. Even then - where are the use cases? I’d like to know.
Susan Scrupski asked me if I was going to attend Enterprise 2.0 and would I participate on the panel. Given what I had already said and after I stopped laughing, the answer was an emphatic no. Why would I waste my time listening to a bunch of talking heads trot out the same claptrap I've been hearing the last several years? It seems the panel didn't disappoint my lowly expectations. This is what one attendee said of the debate:
They delivered some interesting, but disappointingly similar-sounding, defenses of how technologies like blogs, wikis, and social networks can benefit big companies. The panelists said that one of the hurdles to convincing enterprise-scale organizations that these new tools are worth their money is the difficulty in quantifying the business benefits. It’s hard to calculate an exact return on investment when it comes to better collaboration: “When somebody figures that out, they’ll make a million,” said Greg Lowe, social media architect and program manager at Alcatel
On the Twitter back channel, Nenshad Bardoliwalla told me:
Your presence here at #e2conf is very palpable. They had a whole panel to answer your question on value, and failed MISERABLY.
Very flattering Nenshad but is that The Ghost of Christmas Future?